Regular service shall resume when I have extricated myself from the suffocating morass of marking and reports that always rears its ugly head towards the end of the second term. If you’ve never seen a morass with a head, you’re not a teacher. I have several in my classes. I didn’t say that. It’s the marking talking.
Actually, the reports themselves are pretty good now. We in the Maths Department, ever mindful of the need for greater efficiency, have filled our reports with lots of useful information that’s generated from the computer records, thereby reducing the necessity for commentary from the teacher. We don’t have to write so much, and the parents get actual data to look at instead of the vague ramblings of someone who has spent hours trying to find a hundred different ways to write “your child is doing well” and twenty different ways to write “your child has not yet worked out which end of the room is the front”.
However, in order to make this marvellous system work, we have to have lots of information in the records. And to get lots of information in the records we have to do lots of marking. And we can’t do it too early in the year because the students’ heads are still empty vessels at that stage, waiting to be filled with knowledge poured by a steady and loving hand from the jug of doing lots of algebra questions. So the marking does tend to pile up just before the reports are due.
At the end of the marking and reporting (and the other marking), I decree that there shall be a party. Said party shall take place at my house on the Saturday immediately after school finishes. According to iCal, this will be the fifth day of June, a day on which I am also scheduled to vaccum the floor and host a Hack Hack Spurt Spurt writing workshop. E-mail me if you want to come, and I’ll count you.
It shall be a theme party, and the theme shall be Not Doing Any Marking Tonight.